Salesforce and Nonprofits: The Refinery Mission’s Success Story

I recently worked with the Refinery Mission to implement Salesforce because they needed a tool that works as hard as they do.

The Refinery Mission is a faith-based non-profit that works with men in need of emergency and transitional housing so they can become self-sufficient and successfully transition back into society.

Johnny Carriere, the Refinery Mission’s executive director, asked ADP Solutions to create a Salesforce-based set of tools so they could manage their clients and donations in a better way.

Since implementing SalesForce, Refinery Mission has:

Increased donations by an estimated $50,000 from the previous year.

Easily transitioned from 32-resident capacity to 64-resident capacity with scalable solutions already in place in SalesForce.

Tracked 484 leads and 3,127 cases in the full year since implementation (when there was no way to track those before).

We worked with Refinery Mission to create a customized plan, leveraging existing SalesForce solutions, creating custom objects, fields and automations. Their implementation needed to handle case management, contacts, in-house projects, fundraising and donor tracking, and more. Before, Refinery Mission was using multiple platforms to keep track of this information, not to mention a lot of pen and paper. We needed to consolidate all of these processes and legacy platforms in one place that was easy for Refinery Mission’s staff to understand and use.

Now, Refinery Mission has an online form for emergency and transitional housing, and Johnny automatically receives an email alert whenever someone submits the form. He can evaluate it on the spot, which is imperative in emergency situations. Once a client is accepted to Refinery Mission, the staff uses SalesForce to track each man’s progress, attendance at mandatory and optional events, work commitments, requests for leave, discharge information, and other behavioral notes.

On the fundraising side, they track all fundraising events and campaigns through SalesForce so they can identify donation opportunities from year to year.

As a team, they use SalesForce to track tasks that each staff member needs to complete and their progress on projects.

It’s unusual for a nonprofit to manage cases inside the Salesforce Sales Cloud, but the team at Refinery Mission really embraced it. Salesforce is a development platform, not just a CRM, so you can use it for unexpected challenges. When I talk to people in nonprofit organizations about Salesforce, they tend to think about using it for donor management. But Refinery Mission is using it for their unique set of use cases and needs, which speaks to the flexibility of Salesforce and our ability to provide something that really fits the bill.

Johnny Carriere has been the executive director at Refinery Mission for nearly 10 years. He told me:

“This is by far the best investment we’ve ever made. It’s that impactful and powerful for what we do, and it’s streamlined everything we do in our organization.”

Want to work with ADP Solutions on your SalesForce implementation? We’re here to help. Learn more about us and our work.